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Guest Column: Three Interns, One Family

August 13, 2018

By: Elizabeth Bassett, ComEd summer intern

When the school year came to a close, my two sisters and I turned to ComEd to find new opportunities. This summer, Alexandria (22), Katherine (20) and I (17) have been working as summer interns to gain professional experience with the company. Katherine and I are both alumni of ComEd’s annual Icebox Derby, but this is our first internship with ComEd.

Alexandria is part of the residential customer team in Energy Efficiency, responding to customers’ inquiries and testing programs to better understand how customers interact with different processes. While she is working towards her career in teaching, she is also considering pursuing business. Going into her senior year at North Central College, Alexandria plans to graduate next spring with a degree in both education and German. I asked her to reflect on her summer experience:

“I learned a lot from this internship that I can utilize in my future. I was able to observe how a prosperous, reliable, and innovative company is structured to run effectively while still caring about its customers and employees.”

Katherine, a junior studying mechanical engineering at Valparaiso University, is interning with the emerging technologies team in the smart grid department. After she graduates, Katherine plans to help create a more sustainable future by advancing green technologies and making them more accessible to the public. She offers her perspective:

“This past summer, I have worked on a number of projects including a microgrid feasibility study, a white paper on low income battery storage, and a white paper on how utilities can aid growth in urban agriculture. This internship has increased my interest in working to advance renewable distributed energy resources that can serve as an asset to today’s grid.”

I’m an intern for the management quality and analysis team in customer operations. The team’s role is to make customers’ calls with customer service representatives as efficient as possible. During my internship, I have observed these calls, helped determine the source of audio issues and collected systematic data from calls and their evaluations. Going into this internship, I did not expect to get such an in-depth exposure to this part of the company. It has been a huge learning curve, and there is still so much more to explore in customer services, the power industry and the corporate world. I am a senior at Glenbard West High School and am planning to study mass communications in college.

Together, we have come to work at ComEd to both contribute and develop our skills. There are opportunities for so many types of professionals here at ComEd—no skill set is taken for granted.